Welcome to the BPS Science family!

Photo Credit: Molly Peters, West Zone ELC

We are a small group of passionate people committed to providing the best science and tech/engineering learning opportunities to the students of the Boston Public Schools. We believe that we have some of the most wonderfully skilled teachers and school leaders and we collaborate with them to prepare every one of our students for a bright and successful future!

Holly Rosa and I make up the academic science team and Bev Nadeau works with us, part-time, to make sure that the Materials Center runs smoothly. Our technicians, Paulette Hunter-Emile, Dot Fitzgerald and Phil Morales, take great care to build materials units for K-8 classrooms -- more than 10,000 boxes each year!

We encourage you to come back to this site frequently to see what additions have been made to support you and high quality science instruction in your classrooms and schools. With only two of us, it can take a little longer than we would like to design, collaborate, develop, and distribute materials through this website. Last year, we rolled out our online, teacher-presented, science unit support SciCasts -- brief videos by some of our science teachers who are sharing their tips and trick for teaching science in BPS. We have nearly 4,000 views!! This year, we are really excited about Science and Engineering Practices resources! We worked with a team of BPS Science teachers and BC's Kate McNeill and Maria González-Howard to develop ten PD modules on the practices for you to use with colleagues in your buildings. Another group of teachers worked with us to develop some student-friendly questions as a guide to developing their use of the practices. More to come as the year goes on -- check back soon for more on the practices, new resources on Climate Change and Ocean Science, and information about our Transition to the 2016 MA STE Framework!

We continue to share our Science Core Actions, Literacy support materials, the Observation "Look-Fors" aligned with the MA DESE Effective Teaching Practice Rubric, Student Learning Outcomes, and descriptions of "good" science instruction. We have not made changes to those files -- we will refresh them all as soon as we can!

Please remember that additional science information and documents are located on SIS/Aspen; assessments and materials that we license are housed on the Science page there. (Sorry there are a few of our close reading assignments that were created with licensed articles, so we cannot post them on this site.) We hope to see you at science PD or at an upcoming Science Social. Please come back to the site frequently -- we will try to make it worthwhile every time you visit! Don't forget to follow us on Twitter and share all of the exciting things happening in your classrooms and in BPS Science! Oh-- and send photos and stories of you and your students! We love to hear about your great work!

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We promise not to fill your inbox and will never share your email address with anyone - we just want to share information, tips and opportunities for you and your students. You can check out the archive of past issues here.

After you have visited the site, if you have questions or comments, please let us know.